Hearing impaired individuals often experience at least two distinct problems: a hearing loss, which is an increase in hearing threshold level, and a loss of ability to understand high level speech in noise in comparison with normal hearing individuals. For most hearing impaired patients, the performance in speech-in-noise intelligibility tests is worse than for normal hearing people, even if the audibility of the incoming sounds is restored by amplification. An individual's speech reception threshold (SRT) is the signal-to-noise ratio required in a presented signal to achieve 50 percent correct word recognition in a hearing in noise test.
Today's digital hearing aids that use multi-channel amplification and compression signal processing can readily restore audibility of amplified sound for a hearing impaired individual. The patient's hearing ability can thus be improved by making previously inaudible speech cues audible.
Loss of capability to understand speech in noise is the most significant problem of most hearing aid users today. The traditional way of increasing SRT in hearing instruments, is to apply either beamforming or spectral subtraction techniques.
In the first case, at least one microphone in combination with a number of filters, fixed or adaptive, is used to enhance a signal from the presumed target direction and at the same time suppress all other signals.
In spectral subtraction techniques, the goal is to create an estimate of the long term noise spectrum and turn down gain in frequency bands where the instantaneous target signal power is lower than the long term noise power. Even though the methods are very different from a technological standpoint, they still have the common goal; enhance the target signal and remove the noise disturbance.
The methods cannot take listener intent into account and may remove parts of the audio signal which the listener is trying to focus on.